Audacity Forum

I have started to have a problem with Audacity and wonder if somebody can point me in the right direction. I have had Audacity running on my PC for a long time, but recently I had a hard disk failure and the PC manufacturer replaced both hard disks. The new system disk had Windows Vista Ultimate pre-installed but I could not get my speakers to work in 5:1 surround sound, only stereo. I have Logitech S500 speakers with a Creative Sound Blaster XFi sound card.
Contacted my PC manufacturer's technical support they sent me a Creative XFi installation disk. I installed this and ran all the updates. I now had 5:1 sound but I then found that Audacity no longer worked. When I tried to start Audacity I immediately got a window saying that it had encountered a problem and needed to shut down. I tried to uninstall / reinstall Audacity but the problem remained.
I then restored to the point before I installed the Creative XFi Installation disk, I was back to stereo sound only but Audacity worked again. I then installed the Creative XFi installation disk again, I now had 5:1 sound and Audacity still worked.
I then reinstalled the Creative Updates and again encountered the same problem with Audacity. I tried installing the updates one by one and found it was after I installed the new XFi drivers that the Audacity problem occurred.
Has anybody any idea why this should happen?

ElBeardo wrote:I tried installing the updates one by one and found it was after I installed the new XFi drivers that the Audacity problem occurred.
Has anybody any idea why this should happen?

It's "Creative" messing you about. It seems to be that the way the drivers are updated upsets Audacity. You could try trashing the Audacity configuration information. This will make Audacity think that it has just been reinstalled and have no assumptions about your sound card (when you un-install / re-install Audacity it does not overwrite the old configuration information, which in Audacity 1.2.6 is in the Windows Registry).

Details of how to reset Audacity are given on this page: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... references

I would also recommend upgrading to Audacity 1.3.5

Thanks for the information I will give it a go but it will be a few days as currently I need Audacity for a project I am working on and haven't the time to mess about.

Will let you know how I get on